Yenya's World

Fri, 25 Nov 2005

Music Player Daemon

For a long time, I wanted to replace XMMS
(the Ogg/MP3/... audio player for UNIX/X)
with something better. XMMS has some serious flaws:

User interface. It displays its window without window manager decorations
and tries to draw its own title bar, and buttons for "minimize", "menu", etc.
This means that it cannot be managed as all other windows with keys and mouse
events that window manager has been set up to use.

ALSA[?] plug-in is not fully
implemented. For example, it does not work with virtual sound cards that
are be set up in the
.asoundrc configuration file.

I had a wishlist (in Czech, sorry)
of features for my new music player. I sent it to the local Linux mailing list,
and someone pointed me to the Music Player Daemon.
It is an excellent application - it runs as a daemon, which indexes the whole
audio file repository on your computer, and plays the music on background.
It can be controlled remotely over the TCP (even with authentication),
and has various clients including a command-line client, GNOME client, and so
on. When running a system-wide mpd, the music playing
survives even your logging off and on. It is suitable even for my home
dual-headed and dual-footed setup.

I have created MPD RPM packages for Fedora (the clients are available from
Fedora Extras). Later I
found out that even the daemon RPMs exist - they are in the rpm.livna.org repository (they cannot be in Extras because of the MP3
support).